
How do you talk with CEOs about social media? Speak the language of social business. A new book by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Business Strategies for the Connected Company, will teach you how.
Social Business by Design shows how social media can have far-reaching impacts beyond its commonly known applications for marketing and customer service. The book makes a bold assertion that companies can transform all aspects of their business through social media, including HR, Operations, and R&D. For instance, Kim and Hinchcliffe, both Dachis Group executives, discuss how organizations have successfully used social for product co-creation through a network of crowd-sourcing partners.
“Until quite recently, social media were viewed either as a consumer activity, with marketing as the most useful activity for a business to be engaged in, or something workers used inside the company to collaborate, and occasionally for product innovation or customer care,” they write. “However, social media have now infiltrated every aspect of business operations, and perspectives have expanded to consider four major and interrelated activities: customers, the marketplace, workers, and trading partners.”
It’s no wonder that Social Business by Design advocates for the development of multiple community managers – and not an overworked marketer to manage your Facebook account, but seasoned executives who understand the nuances of knowledge management (for internal community management) and relationship building (for public facing community management).
To get a better sense of why Kim and Hincliffe wrote Social Business by Design and to delve into the ideas behind the book, I asked Peter Kim to discuss the book in the interview published here. Check out what he has to say – and then get ready to embrace social business.

What inspired you and Dion Hinchcliffe to write this book?
Dion and I have been thinking about the concepts in the book for years. He comes from a technology background, I have a marketing background, and we’re both business strategists. The world has seen the rise of all things “social” over the past decade and brands are just now going on the record to report measurable outcomes as a result of participation. Now that external social media and internal collaboration technology have matured, we felt that it was time to crystallize our thinking and experience to the world in a framework of ten fundamental principles of social business for beginners and experts alike.
Social Business by Design urges companies to act as social businesses. What is a social business? What are your one or two favorite examples right now?
This is an important question, David. Many attempts to define social business are recursive and/or focus on an activity, not an entity. An effective definition needs to describe what something is, then what it does. We believe that a social business harnesses fundamental tendencies in human behavior via emerging technology to improve strategic and tactical outcomes. From that starting point, you can then consider implications on business activities like consumer engagement, employee collaboration, and supply chain management. A great example of a social business in action is IBM; among the multitude of proof points they offer, their developerWorks community saves $100 million annually in support cost deflection.

What’s the difference between acting as a social business and adding social media features to your company’s activities such as sales and marketing?
Social media are tools that offer new approaches to sales and marketing. In isolation, use of social media doesn’t constitute social business – for example, anyone can add a Facebook page or Twitter account to a campaign. Acting as a social business requires a change in the way companies operate, including designing programs so that anyone can participate and integrating social tools and techniques deeply into the flow of work. Process and culture change are key.
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